


Great Big Monsters

by lemonbalmlemonverbena



Series: Nine gifts from the Old Gods [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 03:37:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13309608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonbalmlemonverbena/pseuds/lemonbalmlemonverbena
Summary: The Hound and the Lady Dire Wolf will no doubt mate and make pups. What happens a few years down the line when those pups are nearly grown?"The woman who had been chopping wood looked up, saw Brandon’s five brothers approaching and looked absolutely terrified. She dropped the ax in sheer panic.Bloody hell. This had been happening ever since they’d crossed the Neck."





	Great Big Monsters

The croft cottage looked well-kept but, if he was being honest, a bit on the shabbier side of things. A plume of woodsmoke rose from the chimney, and he could see two little ones atop a...goat. The nanny goat was chewing on what appeared to be a bundle of water rushes and cat tails, utterly unperturbed by the two little girls sitting astride shouting, “Forward! Ya! Ya!”

A woman who was presumably their mother was at work toward the back of the clearing, in what appeared to have once been a woodyard.

Tull’s whisper was not the least bit quiet: “What do you suppose she thinks she’s doing?”

Gane sighed: “That ax is so dull she’d have as much success smashing the logs with her bare hands.”

The six of them looked at each other. Any objections to the obvious? Rickard’s mouth twitched. He wanted to get on to the capital but he, too, understood what must be done.

The six of them dismounted as a body, but he was the one who took hold of the reins of all of their horses, pulling them off the road and tying them to a couple of solid tree branches that looked as they might withstand the stallions’ collective strength if they all panicked at once and tried to bolt. 

Might.

The woman who had been chopping wood looked up, saw Brandon’s five brothers approaching and looked absolutely terrified. She dropped the ax in sheer panic. 

Bloody hell. This had been happening ever since they’d crossed the Neck.

The woman snatched her girls off the back of their goat and carried them both bodily into their cottage and slammed the door. They heard the bar drop. She called out, “Please, sers, we have less than nothing, but take what you need and then leave us in peace.”

Gane called out, in that deep voice that they all had now: “Don’t worry, we don’t bite.” Brandon understood, however, that the six of them, their six black horses and their four dire wolves didn’t exactly reassure strangers.

Gane handed the ax to Tull: “See to this. Do what you can without a proper grinding wheel. We ought to leave her one of ours, but I’m not sure I’m willing to give them up this early in the trip. Small Jon and Little Ned, do your damnedest to break down this log. It’d be better with a two-handed longsaw but it can’t be helped. Rickard and Brandon, take the wolves and look for any snags we can take down. The wood'll still need to season a bit before it's much good, but better start now than later.”

Gane was the heir and everyone said it would be a damn shame if he wasn’t the first firstborn Stark in generations to actually become Lord of Winterfell as was his birthright. His authority was inborn, his self-assurance contagious. He was considered clever for a Stark, and the smallfolk often said he would be a right proper King in the North if the Targaryens hadn’t come back with their dragons to reunify the Seven Kingdoms. 

Brandon and Rickard took off into the scraggly forest and quickly found two long-dead burrwood trees that would suffice. None of the wolves cooperated one bit at their repeated requests to “Come! By the seven, COME!” But then again the wolves never did mind them. The four dire wolves belonged to their four older brothers and they hardly cooperated with _them_ , much less with the younger two. Nonetheless, Brandon and Rickard knew well that if either of them were ever in danger their brothers’ wolves would know before any human could even begin to suspect the risk.

The crofter woman was still barricaded inside her home when they emerged from the woods. 

Gane had fetched one of the lumber axes they all carried with them (along with the customary longswords, dirks and so forth). He was making quick work of the woman’s meager pile of log rounds. 

Brandon and Rickard retrieved their own axes from their own mounts and made their way back to the two burrwood trees they’d marked to take down.

The six of them worked silently. Tull used the whetstone he used on his own sword and ax to return an edge to the woman’s dull and chipped ax blade. It would never be as sharp as it ought to have been--if it had been maintained properly all along--but it would suffice.

Small Jon and Little Ned broke down the woman’s own existing log into manageable rounds and then half-rounds, Gane chopped them down into the same length as the wood in her own dwindling cord of wood, and then they all worked to stack it near her back door, where she could get it without having to walk too far from her fireplace.

When that was done they all went to their saddlebags and retrieved the hard cheese and dried meat and waterskins they had readied for their lunches. It didn’t feel like enough after a morning’s work but it would have to suffice.

Brandon heard the bar behind the woman’s door lift. 

He was pretty sure anyone who wanted to enter the cottage could kick through the walls themselves without much trouble, but it seemed unkind to think of it. The door creaked open and the woman peered around the door. She was pretty enough. Yellow hair covered with a blue cloth. Tired-looking. Younger than Mother. The little ones peered out after her and she turned back to hiss: “I told you to stay inside.”

She faced them with what could only be described as bravery, because she was visibly shaking in fear. “W-w-w-hat are you doing?”

“Chopping wood. And honing your ax blade. Your husband dead?”

Gane almost always spoke first out of the six of them, out of sheer habit, but never without the other five voices interrupting and shouting him down once he’d begun.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake don’t ask where’s her husband, she’ll think we’re going to rape her,” said Tull.

Small Jon added: “Don’t say fuck and don’t say rape! Those kids are younger than the little witches.”

Little Ned stomped a foot: “Fuck, don’t say witch! She’ll think you mean we really know witches.”

Rickard pointed out correctly: “Father started it. And Lyanna Karstark’s septa told her that the only reason Mother looks as pretty as she does after nine children is because she practices blood magic, and when I told Father that he laughed for a full minute and said, ‘Well, she’s right that your mother has a touch of magic, but it's in the blood that runs through her veins not from sacrificing virgins or any of that horseshit.’ And then he said the septa was just jealous that Mother was so beautiful and that the baby birds would have troubles of their own with jealous dry old cunts in a few years.”

Small Jon did his duty: “Don’t say cunt! The children can hear you. Mother would be mortified.”

The woman just stared at them. 

“Who are you? And what are those things?”

“We’re Lady Stark’s sons, from up North,” volunteered Tull. “Heading south for the princess’ wedding. We got off the King’s Road because the wolves were causing too much trouble. They didn’t like all the traffic. Gods be good, we’re probably going to regret bringing them into King’s Landing, but His Grace insisted that they come visit.”

That was true. His Grace’s own Ghost was gone, and he’d long wanted to meet the new wolves that had joined the family. But their parents had also insisted that if they were to travel apart from the household that they take the wolves.

“Those don’t look like no wolves I’ve ever seen,” said the woman.

“They’re dire wolves: That’s Red, that’s Black, that’s Wildling and that’s Longclaw.” The four wolves, lying together in the shade, continued panting and lolling their tongues, altogether exuding a rather lordly air of indifference.

“I’m Irina. This is Genna and Gessa. Come out, girls.”

The girls came out grinning. Their goat bleated at the sight of her returning riders. Brandon realized they were the mirror image of one another.

“Hey, are you twins?”

“Yes, twins,” agreed the one on the left.

“So are we,” he offered as a gesture of reconciliation.

“You can’t be twins,” disagreed left. Was that...Genna? “Twins are only two and you are six.”

Brandon smiled. They were blond like their mother, too skinny, and bold. At least Genna-on-the-left was bold. Gessa hadn’t yet weighed in.

“You are quite right, we are three sets of twins, one pair a year for three years,” he said.

Irina blanched and looked suitably alarmed. He thought Mother would appreciate the sympathy.

“No,” said Genna-on-the-left.

“What do you mean, no?”

“You can’t be twins, you don’t all look alike,” she insisted.

“Ah, different kind of twins. We aren’t all perfectly identical like you and your sister. But they do say we look alike, just not exactly,” he said.

Genna-on-the-left grunted her agreement.

Irina nudged her daughters forward, “Girls, do say thank you to these gentlemen.”

“Thank you,” chirped Genna and Gessa, and for added impact they performed their very best curtsies. Probably not suited for the Throne Room in King’s Landing, but altogether charming in a wood somewhere off the Kingsroad in the Westerlands.

And with that they got back to the familiar work of chopping wood. Each knew the rhythm as well as other men knew the tunes of hymns and marching songs.

Father had said countless times that no sons of his would turn out to be cunt lordlings, and then Mother had pointed out that his sons were lordlings whether he willed it or no, and Father said yes, but they don’t have to be cunts, and then Mother had given her customary look of adoring disapproval and asked if there was a known cure for that, and Father had said, “Yes, those beasts need to work until they collapse so they haven’t time to learn cunt habits.” And so, at eight or nine, depending on the need, they were sent off--always in pairs with their own twin or another brother who was considered in need of some time away from Winterfell--to various homes and holdfasts around the North for what could only be described as hard labor. 

Their Father insisted that they be sent to cottages just like this, where there was simply no possibility of them being treated as high-borns. There was just too much to be done to survive. Wood must be chopped, children must be fed, fences repaired, pigs slopped, horses shod, or no one would make it through the night.

It was a joke in the North that if your husband dropped dead and left you a widow, you would quickly be remarried to a couple of Stark boys. 

Brandon’s first such family was a ostler’s widow in White Harbor. He’d gone with Little Ned, who wanted to be a horse man like Father. And then he and Rickard went together with Winterfell’s own smith Gendry Waters to do what they could when Lord Mazin’s forge had burned to the foundation stones.

They’d all bellyached about it endlessly. They were meant to be training horses with Father. He should be teaching them more about swords and lances and--and throwing knives. What was the point of being the son of the bloody Hound anyway if he wouldn’t teach you all his tricks?! Of course, they soon realized that was the trick. There were no tricks. They’d all had wooden swords in their hands since they could walk. They’d all been training in the yard with father and their master-at-arms and the Stark armies since they could run. But there was nothing like living on your own, learning to manage real people and real work alongside men and women with real needs, to grow you out of boyhood.

And after the wedding of the princess to Prince Martell, indeed, Gane and Tull would become real soldiers in the national army. Jon Snow and Lord Tyrion had been working to build it up since the Targaryens had reclaimed the Seven Kingdoms, and Father and Uncle Jon both thought it would do the boys good to serve.

Gane and Tull would be separated, most likely, and it was altogether unclear if they would be able to bring their wolves. Whenever Mother heard this she looked sad and muttered something about “the pack survives” and Father would get that strange, singular look he always got when Mother was sad, and they would disappear somewhere for a long while, and when they returned Mother would look...resigned, while Father still had that same strange, singular look he always had when Mother was sad. 

Snap. Crack. Swish. Thud. Ah, there it was. The second burrwood was down. Now to haul them down to the woodlot. 

As he and Rickard hoisted the first log up onto their shoulders to carry it down, he remembered something Maester Wendic had said once when Little Ned had drawn blood--and quite a bit of it--from Gane’s sword arm one day in the yard. Mother had been watching and had burst into tears, and Father had seen her and yelled “No fucking crying!” and she had gasped and disappeared. Everyone in the yard was silent. 

Brandon could hardly remember a time when Father had yelled at Mother. Hell, Father hardly even spoke to Mother when anyone besides the family was within earshot. They had a silent language of looks that served them well, but Mother was Lady Stark and Father was what he often called “a scarred old dog who should never have been allowed within a thousand miles of your Lady Mother.” The children all found that quite ridiculous when they were young.

Mother was Mother, and Father was Father, and of course they belonged together. But over the years, as they visited Dragonstone for months on end and served their Northern widows and listened to soldiers talking, they came to understand that everyone else viewed their parents as being an almost inconceivable pairing. Mother was a purebred Lady, kin to the King, and Father was...not. No one could ever understand how they had come to be married--though they were still madly in love after all these years, to be sure--and everyone agreed Lady Stark ought to have been matched with some Dornish prince for political reasons or some quiet unassuming Northern lord or anybody, really, of high birth who wasn’t Father.

And Father--whom everyone knew was once one of the greatest fighters in the history of the Seven Kingdoms (by all the gods, old and new, he’d beaten the Night King in single combat!)--just nodded along as though it were true. 

Their Lady Mother was too good for him, he said, but then again she was too good for anyone, so since she loved him he’d agreed to marry her upon her firm insistence.

He was a notorious killer, they said, and he called himself a brute and a beast and a mad dog, and he’d certainly knocked his boys around the training yard and the wolfswood when it came time for them to learn to fight, but Brandon could hardly think of an instance when he’d been anything less than agreeable to Mother. Mother ruled. Mother was the Lady of Winterfell and Wardeness of the North.

So that day when Father had hollered at Mother across the yard: “No fucking crying,” no one had been more shocked than the boys. Mother had wiped her tears quickly and disappeared, Father had thrown down his sword amidst a stream of curse words that would make the Warrior himself blush, and Brandon and his brothers had just looked at each other in confusion.

Maester Wendic had gathered them together and herded them in his little study. “Your father is trying to make men out of you. Because if you aren’t men, not just good men, but strong men, he’s afraid you won’t last long in this world. And your Lady Mother has seen a great deal of this world’s troubles, but your father is the soldier. She defers to him in raising you in more ways than you know, but it’s very hard for her, I imagine. She wants to keep you safe at any cost, but your Father knows that you must go out and meet the world if you are to beat it. She struggles with it, I think, but they have an understanding.”

“Is Father angry at Mother because she’s...sad?” asked Small Jon. 

“No, I believe your Father is angry at himself because your Mother is sad. He knows that he pushes you and that someday the risks you learn to take may not be wise ones. He knows that every time you boys fight you might lose. I think he’s afraid too.”

“Father?” asked Tull, incredulous. Their father, Sandor Clegane, wasn’t afraid of anything in the world. Not even fire anymore. Their Lady Mother had often laughed and told them that they all existed because she’d once been the only one who understood that Father was just as terrified of fire as a wild wolf would be. But even that was long past, gone before they were born.

“Oh yes, my boys. He’s quite afraid that he will fail you and that one of you will be lost, and that your Lady Mother will never forgive him for killing one of her baby boys.”

“But we’re not her babies and haven’t been for years. And we’re not going to be killed any time soon. And even if we did die, it wouldn’t be Father’s fault and Mother would never think so,” said Gane with his customary confidence.

“You know that. And I know that. But your Father doesn’t know that. He’s quite fragile when it comes to your mother and your sisters, you know,” said Maester Wendic. And then all six of them had laughed uproariously. Father? Fragile?! Maester Wendic must have been the absolute dregs of Old Town to come to Winterfell and conclude that their Father, Sandor Clegane, the bloody Hound himself, was fragile.

“Here, sers. We brought you some water.” 

Genna and Gessa had indeed brought them dipperfuls of water. 

All six of them were now laying waste to the two felled burrwoods. 

Gane wanted to get them done before nightfall so they had a chance to get to proper shelter before dark. 

“Is there a stream around here where we could water the horses?” asked Little Ned. The girls chirped that there was and offered to show him. Ned took all six of their stallions and followed after the girls. His dire wolf Longclaw followed dutifully, and then Red, Black and Wildling sat up, stretched and loped after the girls, Ned and the horses.

The remaining five Stark brothers continued chopping, taking breaks now and again to chug cool water, hone their ax blades or discard a tunic soaked through with sweat. 

One of them had to have a bar of soap, right? They could scrub those down sooner or later, couldn’t they? 

Mother had warned them in her most serious tone that they had better not arrive in King’s Landing for the wedding looking like freefolk come back from a weeklong hunt.

They were Starks, after all. 

House words: Winter is coming. 

Unofficial house words: Don’t start fights, but if you do fight, win.

And now, Starks though they were, they were also something they’d not been before. They were Stark boys--no Stark men, two each of ten-and-five, ten-and-four and ten-and-three--in the south. They knew their history. Mother and Maester Wendic and Aunt Arya had seen to it.

The king, Jon Snow, a true Northman if ever there was one, had survived and thrived in the south, but he was a Targaryen by blood. Would their Clegane blood be enough to keep them alive?

It was the strangest thing though. They’d been expected a scrap or three on the way South. They thought the South would be stalking them, in a way. 

They were expecting a brawl, if they were quite honest. But so far they hadn’t been so blessed. 

Because south of the Neck, they quickly realized that they were...different. 

In the North, as far north as the Land of Always Winter all the way down to the swamps of the Neck, they were Lady Stark’s little wolfhounds by her barbarian husband Sandor Clegane. 

Everyone knew them. Everyone knew their father. Everyone adored their lady mother. 

They’d bled alongside Manderlys to settle the fucking Thenns, and danced with Cerwyns at weddings, and raced down every road and sheep track in the Kingdom with their wild snorting black horses. 

They were known everywhere and treated as the sons of the North. As much as their family was respected--and feared--they were known. Spearwives would smack them around as though they were their own boys, spinsters fancied them and they took wicked joy in trying to introduce their brothers to withered but eager old maids, and most importantly, every boy and man in the North from 10 to 70 took great pride in trying to beat the Stark brothers. 

It was hard, to be sure. There were a lot of them and they were big and they always traveled together and that’s not even to mention the wolves and the horses, but they were considered fair game for a scrap. 

Father was never so pleased with his sons as when one of them came home with a busted eye or a broken sword arm. _Good_ , he said. 

On those days, Mother took to her embroidery with great fierceness and a set jaw and Father huffed generally and put on his war face--this was his face most familiar to everyone in the North, especially the Northern lords. 

His face for Mother was nothing like his war face--his war face he saved for everyone who _wasn’t_ family, everyone about whom he believed, as he once told Gane, “They’ll come for what’s yours, mark my words, but at least they’ll get it over my dead body.”

But when one of them was put to bed for days to nurse a bleeding head wound or that time that Rickard had been thrown off of Rampart, Father put on his war face for Mother. And she didn’t address his war face, well, certainly not in public. (She just knitted or added up columns of figures in her account books or huddled with Cook in the kitchens and did not address Father and his war face directly.)

Just the same, as much as they were the Starks in Winterfell and Lady Stark’s precious boys and all the future of the North and all that, in the North they were just themselves. 

They were both known as a pack and as individuals, always listed in order of age: firstborn Gane, then Tull who came 10 minutes later, and then Small Jon and Little Ned who were called that not for being small but so they could be told apart from their Uncle Jon Snow and their grandfather Lord Eddard Stark, and then Rickard and Brandon. 

Their name days were all in the same month with exactly a year gap between each set, and every other man in the North told them time and time again that he’d been the one to convince their scoundrel father to leave their lady mother alone for a while and that’s why there were only six of them and not eight or ten, and if Mother or Father overheard this, Mother would giggle and Father would chuckle.

In the North, people knew that Rickard had the best singing voice and got red in his hair quickly enough if he was out in the sun a while. Ned was the best rider and the quietest of the six, just like his namesake, their grandfather who had been called the Quiet Wolf. 

Brandon was always in a book, like Uncle Samwell. 

Gane had the strongest wolfsblood and maybe a touch of the greensight as well. 

Despite being second-born, Tull was called Mother’s true heir--the politician, the one with the eye to the dynasty. 

Small Jon was the biggest of them all (clear up to seven feet almost) and the funniest--he had inherited Father’s style of speaking and wry approach to the world, and even if you knew them both well, if you closed your eyes and just listened you could hardly tell which was the father and which was the son.

And yet here in the South, they were none of those things. They realized as soon as they crossed the Neck that they didn’t look like people anymore. 

They looked to all the world like great big monsters. 

Back home, they were right size. They were the size of Father--well, a little bigger--but the right size a man should be, as far as they had ever understood. Yes, Gane and Tull at 15 were a bit taller than Father, and Small Jon and Little Ned at 14 were even taller than them--everyone said that Small Jon would easily be the biggest of them all--and Mother said that he and Rickard at 13 would probably catch up to Father by the time she saw them again in King’s Landing. 

Yes, at home in Winterfell, as tall as Father was a perfectly reasonable size of person to be.

Of course they knew they were big, compared to Aunt Arya and all the little dragons at Dragonstone and especially Uncle Tyrion, but it was the right sort of big. They weren’t even that much taller than Mother, not really.

But here, suddenly, they were not the right size of big, but the wrong size. Quite wrong. 

They...frightened people? Just by walking around and nothing else!

Here when they rode through a village women dropped their washing and starred, and men reached for their swords, and horses bolted, and regular-size mutts tucked their tails and hid. The frightened horses and dogs could fairly be blamed on the dire wolves, but frightening people...that must be on them.

Their first night below the Neck they’d come to an inn, late. They were near the headwaters of the Green Fork, not so terribly far from home. But it was the South just the same. The wolves peeled off as soon as they’d stepped into the little nameless village, so there hadn’t been any trouble there. 

But as he followed his brothers into the warmth of the tavern hall, Brandon felt goosebumps all up and down his arms. The man playing the bellows and the mouth-organ ceased his tune. The innkeeper’s wife clutched at her husband. The two locals in the corner pulled their flagons of ale closer and eyed the door as though plotting their escape.

“Seven hells,” thought Brandon. We’re just hungry and tired and we want a bloody room or two and some decent cover for the horses. There was a mist about and he’d like to know that Oakheart had a decent bed of hay beneath him and roof above him to keep the rain off if it came to that.

“Ale, if you’ve got it, and roast meat or stew, if you can. How much to stable our horses and sleep in a bed tonight?” asked Gane. Tull smiled from behind Gane, trying to look warm and non-threatening as they negotiated for their lodging. 

The innkeeper’s wife brought them a pitcher of ale and mugs and some nice roast lamb then scurried away like a mouse before Small Jon could even begin to sweet-talk her. Brandon grumbled and downed his ale. “Fuck, how roadworn do we look?”

“You idiot,” said Little Ned, “We’re big fuckers and there’s a lot of us and there’s at least 18 blades on us right now, not including the ones we left with the horses. I don’t think that’s normal around here.”

“I was promised whores,” quipped Gane. “Where are the whores?” Father had gathered them all in the wolfswood the morning before they left and given them a long lecture on whores, high-born ladies, assorted poxes that came with both, and what specifically he would do to them if any such women arrived at Winterfell to tell Lady Stark that a bastard had been fathered by one of her sons.

“We’re in the middle of nowhere. Keep your pants on, brother. We have a long way to go and I don’t know about you but I intend to arrive in the capital with more coin than I left with, not less,” said Tull, ever with the clever plans. “I bet we can find a little work along the way and if we have two coppers to rub together when we arrive there, we do a damn sight better with those high-born ladies than we will if we’re flat broke from buying whatever crosses our path out here.”

“You’re both full of shit and neither one of you will have the balls to talk to a single beautiful girl between here and King’s Landing,” said Small Jon.

“I will,” said Little Ned. 

They gnawed the lamb to the bone and washed it down with the ale and if they'd been home that would have been just the beginning of the evening, but here they didn't feel much like singing.

“Can we just go the fuck to sleep, please?” said Rickard. “We’ve been riding all day and I’m tired.”

“Fine,” conceded Gane, rolling his neck in a silent admission that a long hard ride had worn them all down. The six of them wiped their mouths and stood up together and no fewer than three of them cracked their skulls against the low exposed beams of the small room. “Fuck!” they cried in unison. A hard knock but nothing they hadn’t had a thousand times before.

The plump innkeeper’s wife flinched visibly at the exclamation and Tull apologized for his brothers’ crudeness with great eloquence of his own, but she only managed the weakest of smiles. Her equally doughy husband, a squat, ruddy man with a brush-like head of hair, seemed to step in front of her in an act of gallantry as though defending his lady. From them? But they would never...didn’t these people understand that they were the sons of Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane and nothing so much as “good acts above good words” had been drilled into them since birth? 

Fine, they seemed to be a couple of feet taller than everyone else in the room, and they’d heard it said that they all had their father’s stormy gray eyes and dark expressions, even at rest, but Rickard had a jolly spirit and Small Jon knew many funny jokes, and he himself, young Brandon, wasn’t a half-bad storyteller. He knew quite a few yarns and enjoyed listening for unfamiliar songs when he was in a crowd of new people. 

They went to bed that night with an unexpected wariness about their journey south (and their larger journey into the world beyond Winterfell). They slept fitfully three to a room, two young ones on the floor and the oldest crammed into the too-small bed. That was Tull’s idea and it was a good economy indeed, as it turned out.

Mother and Father had warned them that if the wolves ate someone’s precious livestock along the way that they would have to pay for it themselves. 

Rickard and Brandon didn’t have their own dire wolves--it was their fondest hope that the Old Gods might send them a pair one day--but Gane, Tull, Small Jon and Little Ned all did. Luckily, in the North there was room enough for them to range and hunt. It was a bit of a local sport complaining about the Stark wolves taking down prize game: every smallholder in the Kingdom claimed the wild creature they had seen felled was bigger than the one their neighbor had seen taken down. “Nay, I tell you, it was an 8-point buck and Longclaw took him--” “Only eight? I saw Red rip out the throat of a gentleman with a 14-point rack. Eight points? Bah! A mere fawn.”

But the South was not the North. That first morning after the tavern near the Green Fork they were accosted on the road by an irate groundskeeper who said that their dire wolves had killed a prize bull his lord used for breeding stock. Sure enough, as they were speaking, the wolves loped out of the woods, muzzles still red with blood, Black obviously jawing a bull’s horn as he approached. The groundskeeper raised his voice in agitation at the sight of the four dire wolves. Black didn’t like that very much, so in reaction he bit down hard on the horn and shattered it into 20 pieces the way another creature might smash a chicken egg. 

Brandon glared at Gane, not that Gane would notice or care. If he had a dire wolf of his own, or seven hells, the greensight, he would never ignore the pack and let them get so feral. He’d raise a good wolf, one who knew how to kill but who also knew how to behave when it wasn’t time for killing.

And so they gathered together and pitched in to pay for the bull. Tull insisted on recording the man’s name and writing out a detailed receipt and document of the incident and then copying it over twice and precisely, too, before he would let the man go. He said it would be invaluable for protecting House Stark’s honor if anyone ever claimed that their wolves had been marauding through the Westerlands unsupervised, or if, worse, someone sent a raven to Mother and claimed that they had failed to do their duty.

Brandon had been the one to suggest getting off the Kingsroad. 

They’d imagined that they would leave Mother and Father and the three little witches and the whole household behind and go tearing down the Kingsroad on their horses and get there at race speed with days and days in the capital without Mother and Father knowing what they were doing or who they were doing it with. But the Kingsroad was crowded and full of stalled wagons and fine lords and ladies in litters stopping right in the middle of the damn mud to open their shutters and chat with each other as if they were making conversation in their own kitchens. The wolves agitated horses and women with delicate constitutions, their mounts reared and snorted when flocks of shouting village children darted across the road, and most of all, it seemed that every eye looked upon them in trepidation everywhere they went. 

Brandon, whom his own mother Lady Stark had once gigglingly characterized--within earshot--as “my husband’s meekest get,” found himself wishing for someone, anyone to just pick a fight already. Rush headlong into one of us, please. Pull a knife. Speak ill of House Stark, Robb Stark, Ned Stark, Jon Snow, their uncle the prophet who turned into a tree. Insult a serving girl’s honor in front of them. Kick a crippled child or snatch a coin from a blind beggar’s bowl. 

He was absolutely craving action. 

A challenge. 

Anything.

A cuff upside the head, even, sure as he would have gotten from any self-respecting man in the North if he ever disappointed the name Stark or even just irritated someone with a lazy yawn or a whining tone. They were all sons of all the North and up there, they were treated as such.

But here? Here they couldn’t even get anyone to look them in the eye.

And so he convinced his brothers that the straight path was not always the best one. After they paid off the owner of the dead bull, they had found their way to a country track running parallel to the Kingsroad. There was no excitement here, but also was there no strange lopsided battle between him, his brothers and the rest of world, a fight he found himself wanting to take up and win despite their not having left Winterfell with anything but the best of intentions for the journey.

Night was falling around them now. They’d failed to finish before it was too late. They’d best camp here in the yard or perhaps in that meadow they’d passed a ways back. 

It had been a good day, thought Brandon. He knew because his back hurt, and his arms felt like they were made of nothing sturdier than Cook’s stewed apples, and he was so hungry he could throw up, and the pile of wood behind Irina’s little home was big enough to keep them going for months to come. She wasn’t sure if her husband would come back alive or not from their Lord’s armed feud with the neighboring Lord--Gane and Tull were determined to speak to Uncle Jon and Aunt Dany and Uncle Tyrion first thing about the developing danger here--but even if he didn’t, she and Genna-left and Gessa-right with their goat and their chickens would be able to keep warm and fuel a cookfire for months to come. 

It wouldn’t prevent their suffering forever, but it was something.

Out of the darkness, he heard Genna and Gessa chirp. They sounded just like little Cat and little Ellie and little Lee at home. They liked to call their sisters witches--because the Stark girls all looked as much like Tullys as the Stark boys looked like Cleganes, and everyone said Mother’s Whent blood and blue Tully eyes announced as sure as the sun rises that she was a witch--but their Father always said they had it wrong.

The girls were baby birds, and they chirped. Genna and Gessa chirped too.

“If it pleases you, my Lords--”

“Oh we’re not bloody Lords,” said Small Jon, in Father's exact voice, “Our mother’s a Lady, to be sure, but our father says it’s better to be a good man than a great lord.”

Brandon saw Gane’s mouth twitch at that. Gane might cuff his brother Jon later if he thought of it. Gane was going to be a great lord. He was going to be worthy of the name Stark and make the North proud if it was the last thing he ever did.

Genna-left started again, undiscouraged: “If it pleases you, my Lords, we have hot brown bread and rabbit stew with potatoes and turnips for you inside. Mother says there are enough bowls but not enough chairs so you’ll have to sit where you can. Would you please join us, my Lords? Our Mother’s been cooking and crying salt tears into the stew all day because she never thought to see such a thing as that wood pile.”

“Aye, we’ll take your bread and stew, young misses, but only if you promise to work every day with the whetstone I gave you and keep that ax sharp,” said Gane. Tull nodded, “We’ll come back this way some time and when we do, I expect to be able to cut a horsehair longways with that ax. Do you hear me, girls?” Genna-left and Gessa-right giggled and nodded seriously and then giggled again.

The Stark boys slept well that night. Their bellies were full, and they stank of the day’s sweat and the woodsmoke from half-seasoned firewood, and they were bone tired, and there was no room for them in the cottage and they gave the horses whatever other cover could be found, so they all slept together outside, under what pile of furs and cloaks they could assemble into a nest. 

The next morning their wolves found them again, and Wildling was dragging a huge roe deer by the neck. None of the wolves had touched the kill but for the ripped-out throat. 

The Stark monsters had been planning to get on the road early and make up for lost time, but this was good meat and they didn’t imagine Irina would be bringing down much venison on her own, so they hung it up to drain the blood and then they had to skin it properly and butcher it right and so they didn’t get back on the road until midday, and by then they were quite bloody and none of them felt like changing clothes. 

And they still hadn’t found the one bar of soap they meant to share between them. It was here somewhere, surely, but it wasn’t very important. 

They could clean up before they got to King’s Landing, right?


End file.
